Meet The Coffee Man himself! Serbian-born Canberra barista – and winner of the World Barista Championships in 2015 – Sasa Sestic joins us tonight for a Q&A following our screening of this caffeinated look at his globe-spanning quest to find the perfect cup of coffee.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently reported that Canberrans like their fancy bean, cafe-type coffees. So a film called The Coffee Man should require very little in terms of a sales pitch.

The film follows acclaimed Canberran barista Sasa Sestic around the world on his adventure to find coffees of the highest imaginable quality, as well as his 2015 World Barista Championship experience. Who knew there was a world championship for baristas?!

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit I’m not a coffee drinker. To be brutally honest I hate the stuff – the smell, the taste, the small talk in the cafe waiting area, all of it. My friends will be laughing hysterically that I’m even writing a review on a film about specialty coffee. That said, the coffee culture concept is not completely lost on me. The idea that all coffee drinkers have a shared appreciation of ‘good coffee’ and seem to know where this ‘good coffee’ can be bought is intriguing. For this reason I was drawn to this documentary... Oh, and don’t even start my friends chuckling about me reviewing a documentary!

But this film is about more than just coffee. It is the story of a man committed to discovering the perfect coffee bean; the human faces of this industry; the joy that coffee can bring (or perhaps just the ability to face the world); and the intense competition of the World Championships. If you usually think documentary = boring, this film is a charming way to prove you wrong.